Audio 4:41
The future of food

Rachael BrownUpdated
Thu 10 Apr 2014, 8:46 PM AEST

The acclaimed chef behind Spain's landmark El Bulli restaurant is in Australia, sharing his vision for the future of gastronomy. Ferran Adria closed his three-Michelin star Catalan restaurant in 2011 to map the evolution of world cuisines. Meanwhile some chefs are reinventing entire sites, like British-based Heston Blumenthal, whose Bray restaurant The Fat Duck is migrating to Melbourne.

Transcript

MARK COLVIN: The acclaimed chef behind Spain's landmark elBulli restaurant is in Australia sharing his vision for the future of gastronomy.

Ferran Adria closed his three-Michelin star Catalan restaurant in 2011 to map the evolution of world cuisines. He'll do this through a culinary think tank and an online gastronomic encyclopaedia.

Meanwhile some chefs are reinventing entire sites, like the British-based Heston Blumenthal, whose Bray restaurant The Fat Duck is migrating to Melbourne.

Rachael Brown reports.

RACHAEL BROWN: Renowned for his experimental cooking at elBulli on the Costa Brava, Ferran Adria says he closed the restaurant on a high note to document cuisine evolution and to fuel it.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): And there the most important language will be cooking, but it's not a project about cooking; it's a project about creativity.

RACHAEL BROWN: Ferran Adria's Barcelona-based cooking laboratory will attract people from around the world from chefs to designers to architects, and offer them an ingredient often missing from kitchens: time.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): The challenge is to order all the knowledge that has been generated in haute cuisine; a whole thought process on how to improve internet search engines. If you want to put it one way, what new museums should look like.

RACHAEL BROWN: As part of this, comes an ambitious project to codify the world's food; a cuisine taxonomy that breaks ingredients, techniques and cultures down to their very DNA.

And it's a brave person who suggests modern haute cuisine is all about simplicity.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): So this idea that cooking is being simplified is rubbish.

RACHAEL BROWN: Take a bread, butter and macadamia dip starter.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): We didn't see the whole macadamia nut, and you cannot see the grains that made up the bread, or the flour either. And you make butter with milk, so from here you can structure a menu as if it were a radio program or a musical piece.

HESTON BLUMENTHAL: We're doing some more sound experiments on caramels. I want to take like a soft like toffee sauce, and you put lemon juice in so the acidity cuts through the richness. The idea that you can listen to a sharp sound and you'll notice the acidity in the sauce. If you listen to a soft sound you'll notice the caramel in the sauce.

RACHAEL BROWN: As dishes are reinvented, so too are entire venues. Copenhagen's famed Rene Redzepi is relocating Noma to Japan for two months. And Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck is migrating to Melbourne for half a year.

RACHAEL BROWN: How does one get a table: bribes or donate an organ?

HESTON BLUMENTHAL: (laughs) That would be interesting: you could donate an organ and then you could eat it. We're not going to open the reservations yet. I'm saying around September, but it's not certain yet.

RACHAEL BROWN: He says Australia's dining scene is open-minded, adventurous and world class.

HESTON BLUMENTHAL: Australia has some of the best ingredients in the world. In fact we bought more truffles from Australia this year than we did from France.

RACHAEL BROWN: But the master of deconstruction, whose seafood dishes might be paired with an iPod inside a shell playing sea sounds, is warning chefs of the future against innovation for innovation's sake.

HESTON BLUMENTHAL: Sometimes we do see some young chefs doing stuff where they'll stick something in a vacuum oven, then a desiccator, then a packer jet, and then put liquid nitrogen onto it and you look at it and think, you know what? You could've just mixed it with some eggs and stuck it on the oven. So yeah there will always be a danger of that.

RACHAEL BROWN: Not so, chides his close friend, Ferran Adria.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): If he said that in front of me, I would have to give him a tug or two on his ear, because when he began with innovation, if they had told him that, he wouldn't have innovated.

For young people, those who want to innovate, you have to let them do it. I think freedom is so very important.

RACHAEL BROWN: To him, cuisine is less about countries than it is about civilisations. There's no longer an Asia separate from a Europe. He says this global civilisation, and the internet, is transforming the professional culinary world.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): What once took 1,000 years to happen now happens in 1,000 days. This somewhat sad attitude in Australia of being a young country, influenced by so many different cultures - for me it doesn't mean anything. You can adapt parts of any other civilisation and incorporate it into yours, because that has happened throughout history.

RACHAEL BROWN: And what it all boils down to, is pleasure.

FERRAN ADRIA (translation): Without a doubt, cooking is becoming a social phenomenon to rival sport and that's fantastic because, at the end of the day, cooking gives happiness.